Amnesia

1988

160

Larry Heard invented a new way for electronic musicians to speak to their machines—his programmed drums, synthesizer sounds, and bass lines oozed a sweet sadness and depth of feeling that’s still radical. The period from 1984 and 1988 was among Heard’s most fruitful, and the songs he released as Mr. Fingers during those years provide a template for modern house music. Ammnesia tells that story. It collects 12 of Heard’s greatest hits, and each song is iconic in its own way, from the deep house melancholy of “Can You Feel It” to the proto-acid of the title track. –Kevin Lozano

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The Indestructible Beat of Soweto

1985

159

The anti-apartheid movement was one of the dominant human rights causes of the 1980s, and music, both within South Africa and beyond it,played a singular role. The Indestructible Beat of Soweto is protest music by example rather than through any explicit message. Recorded between 1981 and 1984, the dozen songs on this compilation radiate a palpable joy that belies the political oppression of their time and place. It’s both traditional and urban: Loping rhythms, flickering guitar riffs, and shimmering synth licks back a dazzling array of groaning, ululating, harmonizing voices. The singers stick it to the oppressor by mostly ignoring his role in their everyday life altogether.

Soweto received fervent critical acclaim, and Paul Simon tapped its township styles—not to mention the closing track’s performers, Ladysmith Black Mambazo—for his own landmark Graceland. The album remains a powerful introduction to South African music, as well as a window to the polyglot nature of contemporary pop. Most of all, it’s a testament to the human ability to dance and sing in the face of crushing adversity. –Marc Hogan

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British Steel

1980

158

Doubling down on their more accessible sound that first surfaced on 1978’s Killing Machine, the sixth album from the British metal band Judas Priest found them shortening their songs, upping their hooks and melodies, and taking influence from AC/DC, whom they’d toured with in 1979. The lyrics weren’t as dark as on past releases, so instead of S&M, genocide, the apocalypse, and Jack the Ripper, there’s the late-night partying of “Living After Midnight” and the disgruntled down-and-out salvo “Breaking the Law,” which was later heavily adopted by a couple of miscreants named Beavis and Butt-Head. They weren’t suddenly a different band, though: Fronted by Rob Halford’s operatic vocals and powered by the group’s scissoring dual guitars, British Steel showed that Priest could transcend their earlier speed metal races and push towards larger stages without sacrificing what made them special. –Brandon Stosuy

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Lyte as a Rock

1988

157

It took a bit of nepotism for a talented teenage MC named Lyte to become the first woman with a major-label solo rap LP. When Atlantic wanted to sign her stepbrothers’ group, Audio Two, they had no intention of picking up their rapping sister as well. But Lyte’s stepfatherpresented the two acts as a package deal, and soon enough, production began on Lyte as a Rock.

Groundbreaking and unconfined, the album has a take-on-all-comers bravado buoyed by Lyte’s aerodynamic style. She is unflappable—as cool as Big Daddy Kane, as cerebral as Kool Moe Dee, harder than Salt-N-Pepa but just as cheeky. Her raps fracture in funny places, unfurling vivid stories about rhyming rivals, passersby looking to test her mettle, or those dismissing her talents altogether. That monumental chip on her shoulder was a byproduct of all the naysayers claiming women couldn’t rap, and it drove her to outdo everyone: “If a rap can paint a thousand words, then I can paint a million,” she proclaims proudly on the title track. This is a record about being a woman in a boys’ club and blowing up the spot with uncompromising attitude. She wasn’t in it to pander to the male gaze, or to play affirmative action girl. She was in it to win. –Sheldon Pearce

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Hotter Than July

1980

156

Hotter Than July broadened Stevie Wonder’s pop landscape, breaking from his organic soul of the ’70s and looking forward with modern synthesizers and drum programming. There’s a subtly funky country song, a reggae Bob Marley homage, and a giddy R&B jam about a neighborhood dance prodigy. Throughout, Wonder’s politics are urgent and reinvigorated. He sings about housing discrimination, peace in Zimbabwe, and on “Happy Birthday,” he crusades to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday. The sound may be different, but Wonder’s boundless energy and intelligence remain constant. –Jay Balfour

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Imperial Bedroom

1982

155

Elvis Costello’s seventh album represented a crucial pivot in his career. While his previous release, Almost Blue, had him going country, it did so via covers of Nashville classics, giving the piece a retro air. “Imperial Bedroom” was a far more bracing leap forward, tossing all previous assumptions about what structures Costello’s melodies could take, how his songs could be paced, and how far his character portraits could evolve. There’s no strict rock, punk, or R&B on the album. Instead, there are songs that draw on the sophistication of American standards, yet ones twisted by so many quirks, they can’t be confined to that term. Costello also chose a new producer, forsaking his common ally Nick Lowe for Geoff Emerick, the Beatles’ engineering whiz. That particular switch helps account for the sound’s new sweep. The lyrics, too, showed growth, shading Costello’s earlier vitriol with greater perspective, while also allowing for far more enigmatic imagery. The album announced the maturation of an artist whose reach would not cease. –Jim Farber

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Radio

1985

154

LL Cool J was 16 years old when he made his debut, Radio. Ghetto blasters had become a defining marker of early hip-hop, so when LL adopted the loudspeakers as his visual signature, he sent a message: He was a block hero, representing for inner city rebels and b-boys. The album was hard, spare, and overwhelmingly confident: It was the first full-length release from Def Jam and also introduced the masses to Rick Rubin, who produced (or “reduced,” as the back cover joked). Rubin’s spacious, minimal sound brought LL’s flow to the fore. Seething with teenage aggression, overflowing with confidence, and, yes, cool as hell, LL instantly sounded state-of-the-art. He may have rapped that he couldn’t live without his radio, but soon radio couldn’t live without LL. –Eve Barlow

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Dolmen Music

1981

153

Soon after her 1964 debut in New York’s concert halls, the composer, singer, and pianist Meredith Monk revealed her theatrical talents in the realm of experimental song. She also proved adept at moving between mediums, sagaciously editing and rearranging her stage shows into LPs, starting on her 1971 debut Key. But her skill at writing albums reached a new level with her first recording for ECM in 1981.

Dolmen Music’s two halves reflect distinct approaches. Side A collects some of the best songs from two early conceptual shows, focusing on the connection between her writing for piano and her own voice. This is early Monk at her best, with catchy piano motifs working as the ground beneath her vocal acrobatics. As excitable and tinny tones alternate with luminous, slower lines, Monk crafts new dramatic—often wordless—worlds. By bringing conceptual theater inside classical music, she didn’t merely invigorate the latter. She also brought new, contemporary-art audiences along with her. –Seth Colter Walls

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II

1984

152

Though hardcore punk later came to adopt strict rules, early on it was adaptable, prone to local mutations. Formed in 1980 in Phoenix, Arizona, by brothers Curt and Cris Kirkwood, Meat Puppets were one of the first bands to sign to SST, the foundational punk imprint run by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn. But if Meat Puppets’ self-titled debut—a bristly fusion of hardcore thrash and Beefheart weirdness—could pass for a punk record, II was very much on its own trip. Its outsider Americana took in Grateful Dead-style jamming, fearsome pulpit sermons, and peyote-addled surrealism. Cowpunk thrashes like “Split Myself in Two” and “New Gods” suggested the trio hadn’t entirely outgrown its hardcore roots, but the moments that linger are the pretty ones, like the shimmering guitar instrumental “Aurora Borealis,” a beautiful acid trip amid the cacti. II found new life in 1994 when Nirvana reprised three of its songs on MTV Unplugged in New York, the three Puppets in tow. –Louis Pattison

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Compilation

1988

151

The Clean had already put out two EPs, catalyzed the New Zealand punk scene, reformed under a new name, and dissolved by the time their music officially hit the United States in 1988. Picked up by the tastemaking Homestead Records (run largely by zine editor and future Matador founder Gerard Cosloy), Compilation included the entirety of 1981’s Boodle Boodle Boodle, showcasing a band that reinvested lo-fi punk with the kind of self-imploding, psychedelia-loving fun often missing from their grim American and British contemporaries. Unafraid to either get totally gnarled (as on their eternal jam vehicle “Point That Thing Somewhere Else”) or uncork pure sunshine (“Tally Ho!”), the Clean’s constant experimentation resisted nearly all of punk’s emergent stereotypes and musical formulas. Finding devotees in Pavement and Yo La Tengo, and inspiring a major indie vogue for all things New Zealand, the Clean soon reunited, turning a bit more jangly in the process. But Compilation still sounds as fuzzed and free as the day it crash-landed on U.S. shores. –Jesse Jarnow

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The Well-Tuned Piano

1987

150

During the 17 years of work that preceded the first release of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” minimalist pioneer La Monte Young was developing and testing everything about the piece—including the unusual tuning he preferred for his custom Bösendorfer Imperial Grand piano, as well as the improvisational approach that he would use when playing it. But despite the deliberate pace of “The Well-Tuned Piano”—this live recording from 1981 lasts five hours—sustained listening reveals that it isn’t all about slowness. Sometimes it’s about the pummeling power of a specific chordal area, explored at intense volume, in what Young terms “clouds.” Sometimes it’s about the (comparatively) swift transitions between themes—as with a section in the third hour that includes the “Hommage à Debussy Sequence” as well as “The Goddess of the Caverns Under the Pool” and “Sunshine in the Old Country.”The piece isn’t officially finished, but this performance, all on its own, is beautiful enough to support decades of close listening. –Seth Colter Walls

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Rapture

1986

149

The songs on Anita Baker’s second album, Rapture, are all shimmering vehicles for her voice, a contralto as textured and liquid as crushed velvet. Each arrangement is a slow-forming quiet storm that seems to respond sensitively to her muted inner quakings. She’s an impressionistic, painterly singer. The substance of her voice sifts and pours wordlessly through the synth blushes on “Caught Up in the Rapture,” and it shivers with the same weightless ripple produced by the drum machine in “Same Ole Love.” Everything is almost a little too luminous and precise in its drift to be real; Rapture is an R&B record upholstered in a dreamy haze, suggesting, in its varied swells and glitterings from both Baker and her band, that real love is as deep and indefinite as a dream. –Brad Nelson

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Rites of Spring

1985

148

There isn’t enough hot tea and honey on the planet to undo the damage Guy Picciotto must have done to his vocal cords during these sessions. For a mid-’80s D.C. hardcore album, Rites of Spring’s lone full-length was uncommonly melodic. But nobody remembers it that way, because for all the musicianship hidden under the hood, it's hard to register anything other than the fury and agony at the surface. It’s a portrait of crisis driven by one of the most violent, demanding vocal performances ever captured on record.

Underscoring the seething despair in his lyrics, Picciotto sang as if choking on a Brillo pad, punishing his larynx until all that remained was a tattered rasp. He effectively turned singing into a form of self-flagellation. Rites of Spring is widely credited as the first emo album, which overstates its footprint somewhat. For generations of bands, the record has been less an influence than an ideal. Musicians may have marveled at Picciotto's sheer commitment to expression, but few dared to replicate it. –Evan Rytlewski

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In the Gardens Where We Feel Secure

1983

147

“Swing gate,” “lambs Sunday afternoon,” “owl, clock, night noises.” These are some of the sounds—or maybe ingredients—credited as part of Virginia Astley’s deeply beautiful In the Gardens Where We Feel Secure, an inimitable album of ambient music.On it, the English artist manipulates and loops such sounds, blending them with earthy piano. Astley occasionally worked on more straightforward pop, but Gardens abandons the normal inclinations of song structure in favor of two side-long suites, an organic recreation of what it feels like to be cradled by a warm British afternoon in the countryside on a slow day. Its feeling is both ancient and eternal—many worlds away from our fast-moving, digital era. –Matthew Schnipper

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Grip It! On That Other Level

1989

146

After their Run-D.M.C.-aping debut, Making Trouble, flopped by all conceivable metrics, Geto Boys went through some personnel changes, ending up with a foursome that would put Houston rap—and, to a certain extent, Southern rap—on the map: Bushwick Bill, DJ Ready Red, Willie D, and Akshen, later known as Scarface. The songs on Grip It! On That Other Level blend the real-world horrors of Houston’s 5th Ward with exaggerated savagery from slasher flicks. (“Should I live in reality? Or live in the television?” Bushwick Bill asks on “Mind of a Lunatic.”) The hair-raising scenes of murder and torture are so dark that they’ve often been cited as formative texts for the horrorcore stylings of Eminem and Tyler, the Creator. But beneath those obvious incitements are gut-wrenching truths, revealing the shock raps as a front for latent unease: “This game is dangerous, I’m livin’ in fear,” Scarface admits on “Life in the Fast Lane.” This is music that elicits both pangs and thrills from its studies of violence, all of it coming from a clear-eyed vantage point. The Geto Boys were sociologists; Grip It! is their survey of baser instincts. –Sheldon Pearce

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Hi, How Are You: The Unfinished Album

1983

145

These songs are recorded so intimately, it almost feels like an invasion to listen to them. Daniel Johnston’s Hi, How Are You originally came out as a self-released mail-order tape and eventually became among the most influential lo-fi records of the ’80s, to the point that Kurt Cobain famously wore a shirt with the album’s cover drawing at the 1992 VMAs. The record dismissed the conceit that music needed to be created in an expensive studio to resonate emotionally with its listeners. If anything, the record’s tape hiss and flat notes add to its immediacy. It’s easy to imagine Daniel Johnston pounding away on a cheap keyboard on “Big Business Monkey” or fiddling with a kids’ toy on “Walking the Cow.” Even the guitar tracks, like “Despair Came Knocking,” have a tactility to them, like the Austin songwriter is in the room with you as he’s playing.

Because Hi, How Are You is an album about loneliness and desolation, the feeling of sharing space with Johnston makes it ring with additional poignancy. He sang these earnest, infectious melodies to himself, into a cheap cassette recorder, but he knew exactly how to reach people across time—to make them feel that, for the duration of a three-minute pop song, they weren’t on their own in this world. –Sasha Geffen

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Sandinista!

1980

144

On their fourth album, the Clash combined their passion for global politics with an embrace of world music, most notably Jamaican dub and reggae. It’s one thing to bemoan the plight of the impoverished on a track; it’s another to do that over a dub reinvention of the same track, as they did with “One More Time” and “One More Dub.” The Clash, of course, did not abandon their guitar origins, turning Sandinista! into an experimental, triple-album behemoth that melded punk’s urgency with reggae’s bent toward social justice. Sandinista! is a near-anthropological undertaking that is in loving awe of its sources, a feat of passion and endurance that the band would never again match. –Matthew Strauss

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Milo Goes to College

1982

143

The average song on Descendents’ Milo Goes to College is about a guy fearing what he doesn’t understand, which is basically everything: parents, social hierarchies, the lingering allure of conformity, and women, the most baffling and powerful authority figure of them all. Frontman Milo Aukerman described his band’s spitball attack of a debut as “completely unfiltered,” and like many other documents of ’80s pop rebellion, Milo Goes to College tends towards the highly problematic at points. GiveDescendents as much blame or credit as you want for fathering the Warped Tour, but “Marriage,” “Parents,” and especially “I’m Not a Punk” are evidence of what pop-punk does best. –Ian Cohen

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Through the Looking Glass

1983

142

A beautiful demonstration of minimalist composition, Midori Takada’s 1983 solo album Through the Looking Glass was nearly lost to time. Never released on CD and an expensive rarity on vinyl, the four-song, 42-minute album was performed and recorded almost entirely by Takada in just two days, straight to analog tape. Despite its relative obscurity in Western circles, it’s a work that should place her among the most important avant-garde composers of the ’80s. Throughout the album, Takada reinterprets traditional Asian rhythms with a blend of chimes, gongs, and other percussion instruments. This is music that tears open a meditative portal, luring the listener into a new world of tranquility before crescendoing into a gorgeously aggressive wall of transients. The Japanese composer is now 66 years old, but her mission remains unchanged: “In my own way, I create sounds, and by myself, I emit them,” Takada said last year. “It’s that simple. So to speak, it’s like living off the land.” –Noah Yoo

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To Mega Therion

1985

141

If your favorite metal band pisses people off, then Celtic Frost’s relentlessly creative leader Tom G. Warrior probably did it first in the ’80s. Too extreme? His early group, Hellhammer, helped define the sounds of death metal and black metal while being critically slaughtered by the burgeoning underground. Too commercial? Try Cold Lake, Celtic Frost’s collection of croony glam anthems, released to universal disdain in 1988.

Between those two poles, Celtic Frost released some of the decade’s most brilliant and influential music. The Swiss metal group’s imperial streak begins with To Mega Therion, their sophomore album, which spread apocalyptic visions over ungodly, vicious thrash metal. As subgenres began to harden into unified aesthetics, this music could not be pinned down: French horns, droning keyboards, and constantly shifting song structures assured that even the most devoted metalheads had never heard anything quite like it. Whatever response they elicited, Celtic Frost never seemed to care much: After all, they reminded us, we’re all going to the same place anyway. –Sam Sodomsky